Why Women Choose Some Jobs Over Others: New Study Reveals the Power of Gender Representation

Women make up roughly half of the United States population, yet they remain a minority in many of the country’s most influential professions, from politics and technology to science and academia. A new study by psychologists at Emory University, published in the journal PLOS One, offers a striking explanation for this persistent imbalance: women are drawn to fields where they can see more of themselves. The research suggests that gender representation is not merely a symbolic nicety but a powerful, measurable driver of women’s career decisions, potentially shaping the trajectory of entire professions across generations.

The study, led by Emory professor of psychology Stella Lourenco, comprised a series of questionnaire experiments involving 1,680 U.S. adults between the ages of 18 and 64, recruited through the online testing platform Prolific. The participant pool included 851 women and 829 men. Across the experiments, the effect of gender demographics on participants’ responses proved remarkably robust, particularly among women, who were more likely to express interest in jobs portrayed as having more female representation. Intriguingly, this preference held even when the abilities required by the jobs were ones stereotypically associated with men.

“Some people may think of gender representation as mostly symbolic — that it’s simply nice for women to see themselves represented in a field,” Lourenco explained. “What we found is that gender representation is more consequential. It is perhaps a primary reason women decide whether to enter a particular occupation in the first place.” The co-authors of the study include Arber Tasimi, assistant professor of psychology at Emory; Kylee Novick, who completed the work as an Emory undergraduate; and Ryno Kruger, who worked on the project as an Emory graduate student and is now an assistant professor of psychology at Brigham Young University.

The historical backdrop makes the findings especially significant. One hundred years ago, most women in the United States did not work outside the home. Their workplace presence grew steadily over the decades as societal norms shifted and opportunities expanded. By 2023, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 77 percent of prime working-age women held jobs outside the home. Women have forged careers in many fields where their numbers were once vanishingly small, and yet large disparities in gender representation persist across crucial sectors of the economy, prompting researchers to investigate the psychological mechanisms that sustain them.

Previous scholarship has pointed to several candidate explanations. One influential framework is the field-specific ability beliefs, or FAB, theory, which holds that female underrepresentation in certain domains reflects societal stereotypes linking men, but not women, with “brilliance” or intrinsic aptitude. Under this view, women may feel unwelcome in fields perceived to emphasize raw brilliance, such as philosophy, economics, and the STEM disciplines. Conversely, FAB suggests women may feel more welcome in fields like education and nursing, which are stereotypically associated with dedication and diligence rather than innate talent. Related research has examined the impact of what has been called “masculinity contest culture,” a term describing fields such as technology that are perceived to prize stereotypically male traits like aggressiveness, assertiveness, independence, ambition, and competitiveness.

The Emory team set out to disentangle these factors. “We wanted to tease out to what extent current gender representation matters to women’s career preferences,” Lourenco said. “Does it matter more than perceptions about what it takes to succeed in a particular field and the workplace culture associated with it?” In the first study, participants were shown an occupation and asked to estimate its gender ratio using a sliding scale. Their average estimates correlated significantly with the actual gender composition of 60 different fields, confirming that people hold broadly accurate beliefs about which professions skew male or female.

Participants then rated their agreement with statements designed to probe their inherent beliefs about these occupations, including “This job requires a special aptitude that just can’t be taught,” “With the appropriate training and resources, I feel like I would belong in this occupation,” and “In this job, one person’s loss is another person’s gain.” They also indicated how similar they felt to the typical people who hold each job. The analysis largely supported earlier research: beliefs about brilliance, dedication, and workplace culture do contribute to people’s interest in different jobs. Women showed a preference for jobs associated with dedication, while men gravitated toward those emphasizing brilliance and competition. Crucially, however, the results extended this work by revealing the independent importance of perceived gender demographics, particularly among women.

The most dramatic evidence came from experiments using hypothetical job advertisements. In one study, participants viewed ads that either emphasized the need for brilliance or for dedication, and that also explicitly stated the male-female distribution within each role. Strikingly, women’s anticipated sense of belonging was even higher for a female-dominated job that emphasized brilliance than for a male-dominated job that emphasized dedication — a result that upends the assumption that the framing of required abilities is what matters most. Men’s ratings of anticipated belonging, by contrast, were largely unaffected by either the brilliance-versus-dedication messaging or by gender representation. A further quantitative study found that the higher the ratio of women in female-dominated jobs, the stronger women’s ratings of belonging became, while men also preferred gender-majority jobs but showed less variation in their responses as the ratio shifted.

Throughout the studies, women’s responses consistently placed a higher value on female representation than on any other variable in the job advertisements. “One hypothesis is that gender representation may be a proxy for workplace climate,” Lourenco said, signaling expectations about support, inclusivity, and competitiveness. Women may reasonably infer, she noted, that fields with fewer women are also more likely to feature a masculine-stereotyped competitive culture. In this way, the visible gender ratio of a profession functions as a kind of social signal, conveying information about what it would actually feel like to work there long before a candidate ever applies.

The implications of the findings reach far beyond the laboratory. “Gender representation is often spoken of simply as a result of women choosing not to work in a particular field,” Lourenco said. “Our work suggests that gender representation is also an important underlying cause of fewer women choosing to work in certain fields. It’s really a self-reinforcing cycle. Today’s gender representation likely plays a role in shaping tomorrow’s gender representation.” In other words, the demographics of a profession are not merely an outcome of individual choices but an active input into those choices, meaning that modest gains in representation today could compound into substantially greater diversity in the future. The research was funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation, and its message is clear: if organizations and policymakers want to diversify male-dominated fields, changing how women are represented within them may be one of the most powerful levers available.

Subject of Research: The influence of perceived gender representation on women's career interest and sense of belonging across occupations

Article Title: Gender representation key to women’s job interest, study suggests

Article References: Gender representation key to women’s job interest, study suggests. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: gender representation, women in STEM, career choice, occupational segregation, field-specific ability beliefs, workplace culture, psychology, PLOS One, Emory University, sense of belonging, labor market, gender stereotypes